Page 142 of Red Scale Daddy
The movement costs more than it should. My arms are heavy, my vision pulsing at the edges, black pressing in and withdrawing with each slowing heartbeat. I stretch one handout, claws extended, and scrape across the surface of the debris as it passes.
Metal tears under my grip.
I nearly lose it.
Then my claws catch.
The impact wrenches my shoulder hard enough that something gives with a hot, bright flash of pain. My body slams against the wreckage, and I cling to the frozen metal with both hands while my legs drift uselessly behind me.
Good.
That is something.
The wreckage is a curved piece of outer hull, maybe from some old Alliance transport, maybe from something that never had the decency to label itself before it died. It rotates slowly, carrying me with it, and for a few seconds I have the strange, terrible illusion of stability. My chest convulses, trying again to breathe. My throat closes against nothing. Spots bloom across my vision.
Roma is alive.
That thought holds.
They wanted her alive. They stunned her. They called her useful. They took her because her brain is worth more to them than the ship they gutted. That means she has time. Maybe not much. Maybe time measured in threats and chains and whatever sick games Reapers play with people they think they own.
But time.
I press my forehead against the frozen hull fragment and force my thoughts into order.
Find air.
Find weapon.
Find Roma.
Simple plan.
Terrible plan.
I have worked with worse.
A shadow moves across the wreckage.
At first I think it is another piece of debris passing between me and some distorted light source, but then the shape shifts against the field around it with controlled motion. Small vessel. Ugly as sin. Built from pieces that have no business cooperating. Its hull is patched in different metals, its profile uneven, its engines burning low and dirty blue through a web of improvised shielding.
It should not fly.
It does.
A beam of light sweeps across the debris field, thin and searching. It passes over me once, keeps moving, then snaps back.
I bare my teeth, because waving seems optimistic and I have no air to waste.
The vessel angles closer.
A hatch opens along its underside, and a tethered retrieval arm unfolds with a jerky, mechanical grace that makes me distrust it immediately. The clamp reaches toward me, misses on the first pass because the wreckage rotates, then adjusts and comes in again.
“Yeah,” I mouth silently. “Take your time.”
The clamp locks around my torso.
Pain explodes through every injury I own as it tightens and yanks me off the hull fragment. My claws rip free of the metal, and for a second I swing loose between nothing and nowhere, hauled toward the little ship like an especially angry piece of salvage.
